Have something to say?

Ready to be published? LXer is read by around 350,000 individuals each month, and is an excellent place for you to publish your ideas, thoughts, reviews, complaints, etc. Do you have something to say to the Linux community?

LXer Weekly Roundup for 26-Aug-2012

The latest installment of the LXer Weekly Roundup for your reading pleasure. Enjoy!

LibreOffice team to focus on hard bugs: In a new initiative, "LibreOffice HardHacks", the LibreOffice developers are being called on to take on the harder bugs in the LibreOffice code. Bjoern Michaelsen announced the programme, which is complementary to an earlier successful project "LibreOffice Easy Hacks", which set out to get the "low hanging fruit" bugs, the ones that would be easy to resolve and would bring new developers on board.

Disney sitcom says open source is insecure: Shake it Up, a Disney sitcom that screens on The Disney Channel around the world, has slipped in an insult to open source software. The show, which tracks the activities of a group of aspiring dancers on a TV show called "Shake it Up, Chicago", appears to be aimed at tweens. We make that assertion based on the age of comments on its web site, the brightly-coloured costumes and stereotypical big-brush-strokes characters. In the offending episode one such character, a squeaky-voiced, glasses-and-argyle-jumper-wearing kid who is clearly meant to be a nerd, is asked to fix another character's stricken computer.

Resistance is Futile: Disney’s Open Source Brainwashing: A recent episode of the Disney channel “sitcom”, Shake It Up, included a rather odd comment regarding open source software. The exchange between the youngsters essentially suggests that using open source code can lead to software being infiltrated by viruses or other malware, and being a “rookie mistake”:

How to Help Valve on Linux: There is a chance that Valve’s visit to the Linux operating system may just come and go. There are a few things that you can do to make sure that this does not happen.

File under 'disturbing': Debian Wheezy doesn't ship with the Synaptic Package Manager: My current Debian Wheezy installation is an upgrade from Squeeze, so I was unprepared for what just happened: I'm doing a bunch of installs in between my other work, and I just got around to a traditional Wheezy desktop installation with the GNOME desktop using netinstall image. I was unprepared for the only GUI package manager to be GNOME Package Kit. No Synaptic Package Manager. Not even the "Sofware Center" ported from Ubuntu that shipped in Squeeze.

Genius Mathematics Tool!: Genius Mathematics is a very useful tool that intends to help with many things from simple calculations to complex research and education. The application uses a its own language extension called GEL, and many of the standard genius functions are written in GEL itself.

Gnome 3.6 first impressions | Simply Beautiful!: Johansson or Gnome, Gnome or Johansson? I am very sorry but I have to say it. Both are ***** beautiful! I tried Gnome 3.5.90 for about 7 hours, and I don’t really know what to write about it. Gnome 3.6 it’s impressive better than its predecessor. Fast, clean, simple, pretty. This time Gnome isn’t about the Shell. While Shell received significant changes, the rest modules of Gnome pull the attraction. Amazing things from the Gnome Team in this release. Congratulations boys ‘n’ girls of Gnome Team!

Totem Movie Player Is Now Known as Videos: The major change in this Beta release is the name, as the GNOME development team decided to change it to Videos. To make this clear, you will no longer see a Movie Player entry in Ubuntu, you'll see a Videos app instead. Among other features of Totem Videos 3.6 Beta we can mention support for Wayland, HTTP proxy support, GStreamer 1.0 port, animated rotations, av-offset support, initial chapter support in non-DVDs, better search sidebar, Grilo 0.2 is now used to list DVDs and other optical media, some menu items were moved to the app menu, and much more.

Why Fedora 18 Will Be The Practical Choice For Vanilla Enthusiasts: We all know about the rocky road that Gnome 3 has been travelling on since March of last year. Not since KDE 4.0 has a desktop environment been met with such community backlash and perceived exodus. I say “perceived” because that’s what it is. In the world of Linux, these things are almost impossible to measure and are almost always gauged by media reaction. These powerful media reactions almost always build the bandwagon that everyone hops onto.

Linux and Apple: Which Is the Lemon, Which Is the Lemonade?: When life gives you lemons, everyone knows you should make lemonade. But what if life gives you Linux on a Retina MacBook Pro? That, too, has been shockingly referred to as a "lemon" in recent days, but the solution there isn't so clear. "If you are planning to buy one of the new Apple MacBook Pro notebooks with a Retina Display for use under Linux, hold off on your purchase," warned Phoronix's Michael Larabel.

Installing Software from the KDE System Settings Menu: Think "installing software in distros like Debian and Ubuntu", and you think automatically of Synaptic, apt-get on the command line or the new kid on the block, Unbuntu Software Centre. Sometimes, you just overlook the obvious. Did you know that you can also install and remove software using the KDE System Settings Menu? Thought not. Me neither, until I accidentally stumbled upon it--and I wasn't even in the KDE desktop at the time. I was using the LXDE desktop when I spotted it in the Preferences section of the Start menu. Curious? Me too. Let's take a look.